Bath, ME • 17th Annual Trick or Treat TROMP
Diners that open before the sun rises; canary-yellow table tops; pepper flakes falling over house-made hollandaise sauce…
Further, the author argues that we’re actually in imminent danger of ceasing to be political animals at all. Politics being the art of asking “how should we live together?”, there’s little reason to wonder about such questions if we rarely or never, well, live together. Barba-Kay argues that we tend to resolve our cognitive dissonance by outsourcing all the choices that do matter and consoling ourselves with a plethora of choices that don’t. So we have no choice when it comes to closing local businesses, but that’s all right, you can still “decide” what to stream on TV or which people you want to yell at on the internet, since those sorts of choices are free in inverse proportion to their significance.
From the wonderful Anna Havron:
…perhaps I had to care about it much more in the past, in order to be freed to care less about it now.
Sometimes when I remember to rely on this source of wiser intelligence - to call on it for help, and to listen for its responses - it feels like I’m traveling in an intentional river current that is carrying me to exactly where I need to be, to exactly the people and resources I need, to deal with what I, on my own, have been caring too much or too little about.
Happy “Your Order Is Ready at Sherman’s Bookstore” Day.
The Triumphs and Tragedies of the American Revolution — David Frum’s interview of Ken Burns is quite worth your time
Kids Ride Shotgun • Thanks to our friends Molly and Justin for a great wedding gift. Pretty flawless design as far as I can tell.
The Great Enshittening — “I think the defining characteristic of enshittification is not that things got worse, but that we kept using them after they got worse.”
Good interview with Cory Doctorow (ironically enshittified and enshittifying AI advertisements notwithstanding).